


Hate it when you leave (me unattended)

by Vracs



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:33:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23839930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vracs/pseuds/Vracs
Summary: They meet on the bus. S3E3?
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 44
Kudos: 195





	Hate it when you leave (me unattended)

**Author's Note:**

> Eve's having a bad day and it's about to get so much worse.

//

Tuesdays.

Eve hates them almost as much as Mondays, which she hates with a burning passion, but not as much as Tuesdays. 

Tuesdays are a hate-crime. Tuesdays greet her at the arsecrack of dawn with a big, giant fuck-you smile and a twelve hour shift at the kitchen, followed by another six at the Bitter Pill, where she spends most of her time desperately grasping for loose ends like a cat in heat.

If she grasps hard enough, it will bring Kenny back.

Except it won’t.

She tugs her raincoat tight against the April wind and lights up.

The whiskey-coffee combo had been a bit much, she’ll admit. She’d necked it with her first cigarette of the day, contemplating ending it all in a bowl of curdled Rice Krispies.

Death by cereal asphyxiation. _Creative_. 

See? It didn’t take a genius.

The morning wind picks up to lather her in smoke. She takes long, rasping breaths and lights up another.

For a moment, she doesn’t smell kimchi or pork fat or an anticlimactic midlife crisis. She smells like ash and misery - oh, _poetic_ , Eve - and basks in the fact that sixteen hours from now, she’ll be on her third pack of Marlboros, life expectancy hovering around sixty - if she’s lucky. She could try harder, she supposes.

The bus pulls up and she gets on.

The driver’s a twat. Same one as yesterday. The day before. The day before that. 

If she were _British_ -British and prone to social constructs, they’d probably be on first names by now, swapping healthy _cheerios_ and _toodle-pips,_ but Eve itches to deck him, because worse than this, he hardly acknowledges her at all, cementing in no uncertain terms his twat status.

She slams her contactless against the receiver and sulks up to the top deck where her handbag flops off the back seat and vomits all over the floor: tampons, hand cream, rotting fruit salad (she tried, okay?), notepad, wallet, more tampons, tampons, tampons. What in the fuck?

She sucks her tongue over her molars until her jaw pops, fingers rammed into her throbbing eyeballs. 

The bus wretches to life.

Her stomach follows and her handbag stares up at her like a precocious frat boy, as if to say, _ha! Beat you to it! (because I have a tiny dick and I feel the need to overcompensate with everything else in my entirely uninspiring existence)._

She throws the bag onto the floor and buries her face in her palms. 

She might still be drunk. She’d stopped around two (hair-of-the-dog notwithstanding), the image of Kenny’s caller ID dishearteningly raw, and Niko’s messages clinging to her voicemail-Whatsapp-inbox.

He stares up at her now. His butt chin too, and Cola eyes and Eve’s mouth dries faster, feels like old, acrid rubber when her tongue curls.

The bus takes her to Clapham. It trails the Thames and over the bridge (Eve’s least favourite part, mind you, caught between a rock - Chelsea homes she’ll never afford - and a hard place - Knightsbridge boutiques that make her want to claw her eyes out). 

It threads through the bleak, brutalist Soviet architecture of Shepherd’s Bush, which Eve holds in high contempt and simultaneously feels weirdly and inconceivably nostalgic about.

It gets her to Acton, trailing in less than three miles north of Kew but still managing to radiate _shithole_. What better place then, for Eve to spy the first signs of commuter life - cyclists and business suits, lollipop men, posties, unsavoury youths she’s developed a morbid fascination with.

She likes to play Where’s Waldo, see how many street gangs she can weed out before she hears the wail of sirens, a gunshot.

Sometimes the sound hits so hard, so beautifully, it needles the bone. It’ll sit there for hours, rattling, whining, tugging at her - _naughty child_ \- until she’s elbow-deep in take-out and half the bottle’s gone, one hand in her trousers and one hand on her scar, clawing, clawing until which way is up?

The blare comes before the jerk. 

It throws her into the seat in front and her, as it turns out, personal chauffer starts yelling in a language Eve doesn’t understand but most certainly explains the preceding twatty-ness, and _fucking Christ_ , it feels good, glorious to have the silence filled, the pounding in her head dampened by the road rage which now seems to have spilled out onto the street.

She cranes to look out on the pandemonium.

Driver-twat yelling at cyclist yelling at woman-with-pram whose contents seem to be yelling loudest of all.

Eve feels like yelling herself. Wonders what that might be like - to stand up inside a bus full of people and let her lungs rip.

Today the bus is empty. Fortunately. Or not.

Her eyes scan the street. The fight. The broken traffic lights. The bus stop.

The bus stop.

The bus stop that had lain empty - she's sure of it, so sure, more sure than she's been of most things of late and yet it isn't, not at all, and _she's_ there, she's right there, staring back as if she weren't just a figment of Eve's imagination, a fantasy, a nightmare, a manifestation of Eve's endless months of trauma rolled up and tucked into -

What the _fuck_ is Villanelle wearing?

Eve's soul leaves her body.

Or enters it.

Or something.

Whatever it does, it hurts and it blisters and Eve wants it sliced _out_ of herself, wants off, wants as far away as humanly possible, wants to get the hell out, to go, go, go, _fucking hell drive the goddamn fucking bus_.

The bus moves not an inch.

The bus driver's now out on the pavement finishing his tantrum and Eve squats to gather her things quickly, her tampons, so many of them, everywhere, at her feet and under seats, she can't get to all of them, hardly gets any, in fact, hands shaking like tectonics and _God_ , she won't make it, not a chance, not -

"Eve. Hi."

When she stands, her head snaps back and slams against a plastic seat and - _fuck_. She sees spots.

Her knees shake.

Her stomach does that thing again.

She drops her bag and squares to run, crawl even - she could probably dodge past Villanelle and fly down the stairs if she does it now and not in thirty seconds, like she knows she will. And of course, if Villanelle exercises even an ounce of generosity.

She'd get by, knifed a little, maybe, briefly choked if she's unlucky, shot at, if she's _really_ unlucky - there are witnesses, _for God's sake_ \- but she tries not to think at all, _don't think_ , she thinks, _don't think_ , just - 

Her mind starts to race. The escape route is clear as day.

She prepares. She will. She'll just dash for it. She prepares herself.

And against all logic or instinct, against one dreg of better judgement, against any spark of a will to live, rips off her raincoat, throws down her bag and lets herself go absolutely bat-shit feral.

"You're _fucking_ crazy! You're a fucking _asshole_ , you stupid, fucking psychopathic asshole, what the _fuck_ is wrong with you, you fucking _murderer_ , you fucking _shot_ me, you giant _dickhead_ ! What the _fuck_ are you _wearing_!"

And she's racing down the aisle, just like she'd planned, waiting for fists to collide with her face, to smack her silly before she gets there first. 

She would take it.

It would hurt and she would take it, take every bloody swing if it meant finally putting her hands around Villanelle's neck and ringing her out to dry.

She'll kill her. She swears to God. She'll slam her up against the viewing screen or up against the call-bell and alight her until her skull cracks right in half.

Except Villanelle is staring at her, just looking, agape, pensive and distant and something else Eve struggles to name, but it pisses her off like nothing else and fills her with blind, scorching, unadulterated fury until all she sees is red and that horrific fucking outfit.

"Stop looking at me like that! Fucking _say_ something, what is _wrong_ with you!"

Villanelle looks and looks.

Eve boils. 

She takes the lunge, shoving her hands into Villanelle's shoulders.

No response.

She shoves again, harder this time, like she's shoving a locker or a vending machine.

Villanelle remains soft, slouched. 

She wears a men's suit three sizes too big. It hangs loose on her, thin and grey and dishevelled - she looks like she's really been through it - and Eve grabs the lapels, delighted, and nails her to a pole.

She looks awful. Trully. She looks like she robbed somebody's grandad or a failing back-alley businessman, she's just missing a fake Rolex and a gang sign tattoo and _wow_ , this encounter's really bringing out Eve's inner snob.

It doesn't make her feel better. Makes her feel worse, actually, which turns out, is possible.

She shoves again. Grasps clumsily around Villanelle's neck.

She thinks she might just get away with this, gloriously, choking the life out of an international, clinically unhinged assassin like it's going out of style.

She fists Villanelle's - is that a _waistcoat_? and catches her breath.

"Eve."

"I'll kill you."

Villanelle sighs. She's turning crimson, Eve's hand wedged beneath her jaw, relentless.

"You won't."

Eve squeezes harder.

She thinks Villanelle would laugh, if the sound could form. Instead she chokes, limp, and Eve is _actually_ doing this, this is actually happening, she's really going to do this.

Villanelle smells like jasmine.

She doesn't breathe in. Doesn't need the reminder.

Except she does, she inhales, feels her breath shake as Villanelle's eyes change, darken, all pupil and no green. 

She thinks of her kitchen and her fridge and Villanelle's gift and Niko.

"You don't want this."

The words splinter, like glass on tile. 

Yes, she did.

She shakes her head. Her throat burns. Her shoulder hurts, the scar tight and straining against the give of Villanelle's body. 

"You don't _know_ what I want. You have _no idea_ what I want."

Villanelle licks her mouth. It's dry. Chapped. She looks horrendous. 

Eve swallows.

"You don't know me."

Villanelle's chin tucks against her thumb as she nods. 

Eve feels her grip go slack because her fingers go numb, her forearm aches, her armpits sting and her hangover's kicking in way too early, she is _not_ made for this. 

She smells like whiskey, she guarantees it, and Villanelle smells like jasmine, dark and rich and beautiful, even though she looks like shit. It hits Eve like a hurricane, the scent of her, the pathetic sight of her, that wide, inaccessible gaze she swears she finally has one foot in the door of.

"I'm going to hurt you."

"Okay."

"So you can see how it feels."

Villanelle steps up into her lax palm. Close. Hair-breadth away, almost nose-to-nose like the bell might go and the boxing match will start, and Eve will wipe out in the blink of an eye.

The adrenaline wears out and her fear finally rekindles. Now that Villanelle squares up, taller, broader, meaner, Eve feels grounded in her own stupidity.

Villanelle's head cocks to the side. 

Eve can feel her breath, hot and fast, see-sawing between sharp teeth. She's smiling and not-smiling, the kind of smile that starts at the corners but doesn't touch the eyes.

It hurts to look at. 

It disgusts Eve and it irks her and she wants to wipe it off one way or the next, a smack or a punch, whichever comes first, fist clenched and ready to load. 

"I already do."

Her nails bite her palm.

"Liar."

Villanelle sniffs. Pouts. Plays the dutiful puppet to Eve's string.

" _Stop_ it. Just fucking - _stop_ . Liar. You fucking liar. All you do is - _Jesus_ \- all you do is -"

Lie. And lie. And lie. And kill and manipulate and possess and destroy and lie.

The words stick like flies in tar. 

Eve gulps, gasps when the tar swells, inside her throat and her chest and the backs of her eyes, chafing at her waterline. 

" _Fuck_ you."

Villanelle hums. Quiet. Rough. 

It doesn't make her throb. Doesn't make her soften or second-guess. Not this time. Not at all. Not even slightly.

Villanelle stares, eyes still as a lake.

The warmth of her suffocates. It makes Eve feel smothered. Makes it hard to think.

And her stupid mouth is there, the same one that threatened and poked at her, seduced her, infuriated her, open and waiting now, for her to fall prey, to eat her alive.

Villanelle's cheeks glow, burnt with flush.

Eve grabs her there, fingertips clenched to the line of her jaw, and crushes her firm, angry lips against Villanelle's, the clack of teeth welcome and painful, ricocheting to her brain.

The plump of Villanelle's lip juts between her own. It's moist, pliant like the flesh of a fruit, and Eve bites as hard as she can and feels the skin burst and bleed.

When Villanelle moans, Eve feels it in her cunt.

She pulls away before Villanelle can lick at her.

She looks manic, teeth crimson, eyes darting.

Eve shoves her again for good measure. 

It's not good enough. It's not enough. She yanks Villanelle to her, contemplates kissing her again just to hurt her, and swaps it for a slam instead, a quick, deliberate thrust of her forehead right into the bridge of Villanelle's nose.

Their heads bounce.

The collision blinds her momentarily and her ears ring with it.

She feels blood start to gush from her nose, all over her work shirt and pants. She lets it.

The skin above Villanelle's brow begins to mottle and swell like a rotting flower.

" _Fuck_ you."

Villanelle grabs for her, probably to retaliate, finally. Eyes ablaze. Finally.

Eve is quicker, sleeve of her silk blouse catching in Villanelle's fingers and tearing off nice and clean with minimal effort, like tissue paper.

There's that blinding fear again. How easy it would be for Villanelle to end her with her pretty hands, for good this time.

She's down the stairs in seconds, doesn't dare look back, scrambling free to leave Villanelle abandoned in a sea of her own scattered belongings and unparallelled rage, Eve imagines. 

She falls out onto the pavement where the commotion seems to have settled, nose dripping onto the concrete as she finally thinks to stave the flow.

The only thing left on her person is her phone and Kenny, who makes her wretch at the sight of him, bent over her knees to do it.

The bus leaves. 

Eve stares after her only means of getting to work. She is going to be _so_ fucking late.

She pictures Villanelle staring back from the top deck, waving her tampons as if to say, _Eve! You forgot these._

But when she looks, the back of the bus is empty. Of course it is. Villanelle isn't there, isn't waving or smiling or making crude gestures at her and Eve wipes her mouth, slumping against the bus shelter in relief and bitter disappointment.

All the lost blood starts to kick in. The world spins. She rights herself against the glass panel before her legs give out.

 _Tuesdays_. As always, the absolute worst.

**Author's Note:**

> Come over to @vracs1 on twitter for more fic chat, S3 fangirling and shenanigans!


End file.
